Quotes by Women Authors

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.

Marianne Boruch

But truth, that dangerous commodity, has a way of sticking...

When one went fishing in information networks, one also became fish food.

Carol O'Connell

A garden is a human creation. It has to be thought of first, wished into being, planned for like a child.

Amy Stewart (writer)

I was raised to feel that doing nothing was a sin. I had to learn to do nothing.

Replace ropes with bullets. Hound dogs with German shepherds. A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest. Nothing is new.

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze,
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!

Georgia Douglas Johnson

There had been a frozen mist here, and the trees were spun into feathers. Their fragile brilliance made me wonder why, into the spotlessness of Creation, God had seen fit to introduce soiling, twisting, rampaging, Man.

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

Cheryl Mendelson

Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree.

We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.

María Irene Fornés

I've come down in the world. I've slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn't much room for me to move.Most of the time I'm good. I accepted my sentence and do not brood or look back. But sometimes a shift makes me remember. Routine is ruffled and a new start makes me suddenly conscious of what I've become -

The only people who are truly happy are the people we do not know very well...

At least when somebody's suffocating, you can tell: you see their faces turn blue, their lips quiver, their eyes buck, and their throats jerk. But when a man is mentally packing his bags the suitcase is never out until he's already standing on the other side of the door.

Kalisha Buckhanon

It's funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, 'I want to go home.' But then you come home, and of course it's not the same. You can't live with it, you can't live away from it. And it seems like from then on there's always this yearning for some place that doesn't exist. I felt that. Still do. I'm never completely at home anywhere.

All it takes for America to become a theocracy is for nonbelievers to do nothing.

When Mama starts to move across a room, people pay attention. You can never be sure she's not going to grab you by the top of the head to steady herself. And she's pretty free with that walking stick, too.

Darlings of the forest! Blossoming alone When Earth's grief is sorest For her jewels gone - Ere the last snow-drift melts, your tender buds have blown.

Rose Terry Cooke

I suppose my forcefulness will improve once my voice changes. Sopranos get no respect.

Patricia Grasso

English country life is more like Chekhov than The Archers or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

No one can escape stress, but you can learn to cope with it. Practice positive thinking... seize control in small ways.

War rages on the teeming earth;
The hot and sanguinary fight
Begins with each new creature's birth:
A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin.

What the men like best are what there's the least sense in, dresses you can't sit down in, that won't stand a lot of action, that hobble you and truss you up and slow you down and fix it so you can't hardly breathe, till finally you're off in one corner, like a bird in a cage, not cluttering up the busy paths in life that men has got to use. That's the styles they really like!

Ardyth Kennelly

People who understand grammar always have a keen sense of the ridiculous.

Mary Jane Holmes